If President Trump does not release the report from a whistleblower alleging he attempted to coerce Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden, “Congress has the constitutional duty to begin impeachment proceedings and we will exercise our solemn responsibility as Members of Congress to support those proceedings,” Nevada Democratic Reps. Steven Horsford and Susie Lee said in a joint statement Tuesday.

“Despite our past insistence that the Committee’s process should play out before any action be taken,” the freshman members of Congress said Tuesday, “the latest allegations of the President threatening to withhold a foreign nation’s aid—which was appropriated by Congress for specific purposes—as leverage to force an investigation of a political rival are an escalation that requires explicit action by this Congress.”

“If these allegations are true, as the President has admitted, he threatened our national security and abused hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars.”

long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, thoughts of maybe becoming a lawyer someday led me into paralegal work at a number of law firms on both coasts. As a litigation paralegal, I worked on cases involving major automakers, pharmaceutical giants, international banks, large pipeline manufacturers and other sundry corporate monstrosities. The work, by and large, was a grueling paper chase involving long archaeological digs through massive post-subpoena document dumps. You rarely came across The Document that would turn the whole case on its ear, but it happened every so often, and when it did, the cheers from the cubicles would rattle the fluorescent lights: Plowing through all the boxes, dust bunnies, ink stains, paper cuts and miles of memos had finally paid off!

The story of this document dump begins in June of 2013, when a grassroots advocacy group called Moms Across America published an open letter to then-Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant about the dangers involved in his company’s wide distribution of genetically modified (GM) foods and the use of their pesticide, Roundup.

“We ask you to have the courage to acknowledge that GM practices and Roundup are hurting our world,” read the letter. “We have seen the recent and new scientific studies on the impact of GMOs and Glyphosate with links to autism, Alzheimer’s, food allergies, liver cancer, IBS, breast cancer in humans and possibly mental illness and we have witnessed the results firsthand in our kids.”

As the resulting emails show, these accusations did not sit well with the folks at Monsanto. One conversation between Monsanto scientist Dr. Daniel Goldstein and two outside consultants — Bruce Chassy, a former professor at the University of Illinois and Wayne Parrot, a crop scientist at the University of Georgia — stand out in stark relief.

Dr. Goldstein stated that Moms Across America was making “a pretty nasty looking set of allegations,” and he had been arguing for a week that the company should “beat the shit out of them” in return. Chassy was all for attacking the group, but Parrot was less sanguine. “You can’t beat up mothers,” he wrote, “even if they are dumb mothers but you can beat up the organic industry.”

That conversation verged into a discussion of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was at the time holding a public comment period regarding supermarket produce and glyphosate, the ingredient in Roundup that has been directly connected to incidents of cancer. “BTW,” wrote Dr. Goldstein, “a minor tolerance increase petition for glyphosate on specialty crops got 10,821 negative public comments in the last 48 hours — NOT form letters — individually written comments. We’re on our way to being corporate road kill.”

read more at https://truthout.org/articles/monsanto-emails-show-employees-wanted-to-beat-the-shit-out-of-concerned-moms/

Growing up in the Mojave Desert in the mining town of Searchlight, I never understood the sensitivity of the environment — even as mining ravaged the beautiful desert landscape.

There were holes everywhere. There were tunnels. There were shafts, some vertical and some at various angles. But each was a disturbance of the desert surface. And, to top it off, 99 percent of the diggings produced no gold or other precious metals. It was mostly for nothing.

It was only as an adult that I began to realize the fragility of my place of birth.

Today, the Nevada deserts — along with environments throughout the country and the world — are facing threats much greater than bulldozers, shovels and unscrupulous mining operations. That threat is climate change.

I won’t be around to see the worst impacts of climate change, but my children, grandchildren and countless families around the world will be. They’ll suffer the brunt of this crisis. They’ll bear the burden of cleaning up my generation’s mess.

We can, and must, do better.

In 1950 the Las Vegas Free Press began publishing founded by the International Typographical Union, which consisted of typesetters locked out of the Las Vegas Review-Journal for trying to unionize.

Despite the presence of longtime Review-Journal editors Sherwin Garside and Ray Germain, who also were partners in a local printing company, the Free Press was in trouble, with advertisers shying away from it, except for the Desert Inn's director of publicity, Hank Greenspun. Greenspun's crusading instincts and his unhappy relationship with Desert Inn operator Moe Dalitz prompted him to buy the Free Press, expand it to five days a week, and rename it the Las Vegas Sun, as of July 1, 1950. He remained publisher and, except for the brief tenure of longtime aide Adam Yacenda, editor until his death in 1989.

By the time Greenspun died in 1989, the R-J almost totally dominated the region. While he was dying, Greenspun approved his family's negotiation of a Joint Operating Agreement with the Review-Journal. When it was completed the next year, the Greenspuns owned ten percent of the combined operation. The R-J completely controlled the business side while the Sun maintained its editorial independence in weekday afternoon editions and sections published inside the R-J on weekends and holidays.

By 2005, the Sun's circulation in the afternoon, a largely dying market for newspapers, was less than twenty-eight thousand. Its influence rested on its history and the significance of Brian Greenspun, who followed in his father's footsteps as a developer and political figure. The Sun also took advantage of a new opportunity to influence Las Vegans. Given its declining circulation, the Greenspuns and the Review-Journal negotiated a change in the Joint Operating Agreement. As of September 30, 2005, the Sun would appear as a six-to ten-page section each morning in the R-J. While it no longer appeared as a separate publication, its stories, columns, and features now would reach more than 160,000 subscribers.